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Caching is an abstraction, not an optimization

(buttondown.com)
134 points samuel246 | 1 comments | 01 Jul 25 10:42 UTC | HN request time: 0.207s | source
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ckdot2 ◴[03 Jul 25 19:03 UTC] No.44458190[source]▶
"I think now caching is probably best understood as a tool for making software simpler" - that's cute. Caching might be beneficial for many cases, but if it doesn't do one thing then this is simplifying software. There's that famous quote "There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.", and, sure, it's a bit ironical, but there's some truth in there.
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1. bloppe ◴[03 Jul 25 20:53 UTC] No.44459091[source]▶
"Two programs could have similar behaviour but structured very differently, the difference being that one utilizes caching as an abstraction and one explicitly has the concept of different tiers of storage."

The author is comparing "off-the-shelf" caching with custom caching. They're coming from the assumption that you must be caching somehow and arguing that the word "caching" should be understood to mean only particular approaches to the general idea of caching. And obviously the whole point of the general idea is to optimize things.

It's a rhetorical mess